Come closer and listen to the parable of the lamp. Behold, a certain man had a lamp that contained a burnt out filament, so the man was in darkness. But being a wise man, he had a spare bulb in an upper cabinet in his kitchen, where he kept many of those useful items, and when he replaced the burnt-out bulb with a new one, behold, he was still in the dark. . (If you don’t mind, I’ll save the King James lingo.)

The deal was, the switch was off. Somewhere, many miles away, a power station was producing enough electricity to power the entire city, but when he got to this guy’s house, he reached for the light switch and stopped. Since the juice couldn’t get to the bulb, the new bulb was just as dark as the old one with the filament burnt out.

I want you to realize that we start with two things: a light bulb and a power source. The bulb is a glass envelope, from which all oxygen has been removed (some bulbs contain vacuum and others are filled with inert gas, but that’s not important); inside there are wires and a fine filament that stick to the contacts on the outside. The lamp itself is just a convenient means of connecting the bulb to electricity, with a handy switch to break the connection when necessary. And at this point, the connection is truly broken. The main thing is that the light bulb and lamp are intact. There is nothing wrong with physical objects.

There is also no problem with power. It is there, waiting to be used. In fact, it is being used throughout the man’s house. The TV is on, the phone buttons are turned on, the air conditioner is working, and the street lights shine through the living room window. And guess what happens when the lamp switch is turned on?

You may have noticed, or if not, I’m pointing it out, that we start with two things, a light bulb and a power source, but when the two come together, a third thing is generated: light. . The physical object we call a light bulb is just one thing; On its own, you can hold it in your hand, place it on the counter, or let it collect dust in the knick-knack cabinet. But when it is correctly connected to the electrical power, the light bulb starts to work and its function is to produce light. (It also produces heat as a byproduct, but we can ignore that here.)

The light bulb is a fairly simple example of a phenomenon that occurs all around us. If you can accept it, I’ll give you a more complex biological example: suppose I remove the eyeball from my head and put it on the table. It’s a perfectly good eyeball, a bit myopic, but otherwise overall I’ve been pleased with it and its mate for quite some time. However, after taking it out and taking it out of its natural environment, I find that it no longer works. It is disconnected from the various nerves, blood vessels, and muscles that supply the energy that makes it work. That function is what we call “vision”. Once again, we start with two things, a physical object and a source of energy, and combine them to create a third thing, in this case, vision.

I said all that to say this:

And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. (Genesis 2:7 KJV)

It is my understanding that God, working at the molecular, or even atomic level, and using the elements found here in this physical universe, built a human body. He was a magnificent specimen, fit and beautiful, perfect in every way, except for one exception: he was not alive. What God had fashioned from the “dust of the ground” was simply a corpse.

Now that we have the physical object, we need a power source to maintain the item. But before I can continue, I want to draw your attention to something. The phrase “breath of life” used in the verse above, is a Hebrew phrase that could easily have been translated as “breath of life” (I took enough Hebrew in Bible Institute to be really dangerous). In other words, what God blew into that corpse was not just air, but “spirit.” And He not only created a new spirit to put into the body, He “breathed”, or expelled into it his own eternal spirit. This is important, and if we had the space, we could go into much more detail. But for now, we have our two things: the physical body and the source of power, or life, infused into the body by God’s own spirit.

Of course, you can see what happened. As life began to flow through the body, the eyes began to see, the ears began to hear, the heart began to pump blood. In short, all the various parts started working as they should. But here’s the real trick: Inside the skull is an organ called the brain, and when life found that organ, it began to function, and its function is what we call the “soul.”

That’s how it is. Just as a glass bulb unites with electrical energy to produce light, just as an eyeball unites with biological life to produce the function of vision, so the physical Body unites with God-given Life to produce the Soul.

And that’s almost all the time we have for this installment. I know, I’m disappointed too; I can’t wait to see where I go with this.

Copyright © June, 2008
by David L Henderson